


Stay Strong

by KatMorningstar



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Drabble, F/M, Post mid-season premier, hella short
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-23
Updated: 2015-01-23
Packaged: 2018-03-08 18:01:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3218327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KatMorningstar/pseuds/KatMorningstar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clarke sends Bellamy and Lincoln into Mount Weather to reclaim the 47. How does she say goodbye? And if she ever gets the chance, how will say hello again?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stay Strong

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thegameisonolicity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegameisonolicity/gifts).



> pt2 of "i got drunk and my grandbig demanded reunion scenes" so here u go. bellarke. i hurt my own feelings writing this so i hope u fuckers are satisfied

Before he leaves-- before they leave-- Clarke calls Bellamy into the medbay. She can’t leave because she’s needed here: a tree fell in the forest and three people were caught underneath it. They all have at least two broken bones apiece. So she can’t leave, but she can’t just let him go either.

He stands, silent and unyielding, as she looks him over. He has his pack, his knives, his gun. One of the makeshift emergency medkits she was able to scrape together. He doesn’t look like he cares about her approval, but she gives it anyway, in the form of a tiny nod. She knows he sees; he always does.

Do not be weak. Love is weakness. Pain is weakness. Fear is weakness. Do not be weak. 

She wants to say so much. That she needs him to come back alive-- preferably with the 47, but if not, then just alive. That she didn’t mean to sound as callous as she did. That she cares about him, and that acknowledging it is just putting a big red flag over her Achilles heel. But she can’t. Because she is his leader, the Lexa to his Gustus, and Lexa wouldn’t say any of that. So, at a loss for anything else, she tightens the strap on his pack and says, “Stay strong.” 

She knows he recognizes the words, knows from his flinch that he remembers Kane translating what Gustus said just before Lexa drove the sword into his heart. Clarke hopes to God that he understands. That right now, he’s the one with the power to break her, with his strength or with his weakness. He has the power to draw out her suffering or to drive the blade home and end it quickly. Mercifully. 

Maybe he does understand, because his eyes hold hers just long enough for him to nod-- almost a bow, and oh, she could vomit-- turn, and leave. Possibly forever. She tries so hard to keep herself busy with the three wounded patients. Do not be weak. Do not be weak. But she watches him go. Watches him, shoulder to shoulder with Lincoln, slip out the front gate. He doesn’t look back. And maybe that’s the merciful thing to do. Maybe he’s saving Clarke from her own weakness by not prolonging the inevitable. 

But if this is what strength is, Clarke must be doing it wrong, because her knees only hold long enough for her to back into a bench before they let go. And for hours, she might as well be one of the newborn horses the grounders raise, because her legs refuse to hold her.

 

By the time they return, Clarke’s legs are in working order once again. All of her is working. But all she does is work. Function. Carry out essential duties. She supposes that she is as strong now as she ever was, but something is missing. The ghost is out of the machine, the heart divorced from the head and hands. 

Every day, she can feel the shadow behind her eyes grow, and it seems other people can see it too. Lexa holds her gaze longer, sometimes giving her an approving nod without any apparent reason. Abby, on the other hand, barely looks at her. Sometimes Clarke catches her mother shaking her head mournfully, lamenting what could be any number of things. Clarke refuses to think about it. The living are hungry. They don’t need a happy leader. They need a strong one, a capable one. And she is exactly that, no less but certainly no more, when the gates open to usher in the 49.

All Clarke can do is stand in the doorway of the medbay as she watches more people pour in-- more people for her to take care of, more burdens to assume as her own. 

Lincoln leads them, but he is plucked from the crowd by a waiting Octavia. Jasper and Monty see Clarke immediately and make a beeline for her. They crush her between them, Jasper humming apologies into her shoulder and Monty squeezing her with more force that she would have believed his small body to hold. She squeezes them back, the need to remain stoic overpowered by relief that they're here and alive. But the weight settles back down before they even let go. They're here, and they'll be assets to the camp, but they will still be two more mouths to feed, two more hearts full of fear and guilt that she has to sooth. Two more reasons to shove her own feelings down and away, because a surgeon never lets her patient see her shaking hands.

They reintroduce her to Maya, and they tell her everything: how Maya helped them escape. How they had still been too late to help Harper. And how everyone had made it out. (Even the grounders, they say, who had been deposited at one of their own villages to recuperate.) 

“Everyone?” Clarke’s voice is the same flat, businesslike tone that it has been since the night in the grounder camp. But in spite of herself, she feels a crackle of hope. A flickering lightness that was agonizing in its impermanence. 

Everyone, they assure her. And the 49 continue to pour in. Child after child, bruised and drained and exhausted, until...

Bringing up the rear, somehow-- unsurprisingly-- watching everyone’s back at once, Bellamy.

Clarke is no fool. She has made awful, brutal choices, and she has lived with their consequences, but she is not a fool. She knows the difference between weakness and strength, between mere existence and real life, between being bandaged and being healed. And she knows, the moment that life sparks in her veins at the sight of Bellamy, that she has been dead for a long time. 

So long that she almost doesn’t even know what Real Clarke would do right now. She can’t remember the last time she was Real Clarke. 

A single memory, so glaringly similar to the tableau before her, rocks through her. And she remembers what Real Clarke did at times like this. 

Long-slack muscles roar into action as she pitches herself across the yard. It’s just dumb luck that keps her from clipping any of her returning people as her vision tunnels in on one figure, almost buried in the crush of them. Seconds later, she realizes that she might ought to have slowed down at some point, but it’s too late now, because she’s already barreling into Bellamy much harder than she intended to.

Clarke watches his eyes widen just before impact, and she feels the puff of air she drives out of him ghost over her shoulder. Then nothing. He just...stands there. 

For a second, Clarke stands still too. Not letting go-- hell no-- but not encouraging him either. Instead she stands there, arms around his neck, and remembers the way his face crumpled when she told him that his life was expendable to her. God, it rips her apart. But she can’t move, can’t disentangle her arms or shift away from him. So she stays, letting her tears roll down her chin and onto the sliver of Bellamy’s shoulder that her embrace accidentally exposed.

Slowly, his arms move to wrap around her waist. Not crushing her to him like they had once, just holding her in place. It isn’t a comforting gesture, and Clarke knows it. She isn’t allowed to go anywhere until she makes things right. But she has no idea how to do that. She has nothing to give him, just herself and her own pervasive weakness.

But that’s it. Clarke gasps and almost laughs but ends up hiccuping as she turns her head toward Bellamy’s ear. “Lexa said love is weakness,” she pants, desperate to find better words, more important sounding words, and failing. “I guess...I guess I’m weak.” 

Finally, finally, Bellamy lets out a shaking breath and hugs her back in earnest, burying his face in her shoulder. 

“And I’m sorry,” Clarke goes on. “I am so, so sorry.” She doesn’t know what she could say to fix what she did, to heal the hurt she inflicted, and as Bellamy lifts his head, she steels herself for the distance that she will find in his eyes. Maybe he doesn’t hate her, but even if he knows how much she cares, there’s no way he forgives her either.

And yet... When she finally meets his eyes, they are clear and perfect and so close to her own. Without thinking, she leans in closer, needing to kill every last inch of real distance between them. Their foreheads touch, then their noses, and her hand fists in the back of Bellamy’s jacket because this is it-- love and pain and weakness and, at last, after all of this time, the strength she had been missing.


End file.
